What interests me is the transformation, not the monument. I don't construct ruins, but I feel ruins are moments when things show themselves. A ruin is not a catastrophe. It is the moment when things can start again.
—Anselm Kiefer

Gagosian is pleased to present new paintings, artists’s books, and watercolors by Anselm Kiefer.

Employing broad-ranging and erudite literary sources, from the Old and New Testaments to the poetry of Paul Celan, Kiefer’s oeuvre makes palpable the movement and destruction of human life and, at the same time, the persistence of the delicate, lyrical, or divine.

Central to the exhibition are more than forty unique artists’s books, their pages painted with gesso to mimic marble, displayed in an installation of glass vitrines. Erotically charged female nudes and faces emerge from the pages. Artists’s books are an integral part of Kiefer’s oeuvre; over time they have ranged in scale from the intimate to the monumental, and in materials, from lead to dried plant matter. In this selection of books, the sequences of narrative information and visual effect evoke the fragile endurance of the sacred and the spiritual through the female figures on the marbled pages. They are a reminder perhaps of the sculptures of Auguste Rodin, and even of Michelangelo’s belief that his figures were “freed” from the stone with which he worked.

The large array of new watercolors in this exhibition marks a significant return in Kiefer's work to the elusive and sensuous medium. The exhibition’s title, “Transition from Cool to Warm,” refers to a celebrated book of watercolors that he produced from 1974 to 1977, in which cool, blue marine land and seascapes transform into warm female nudes. Kiefer's fascination for eidetic process, rather than teleological outcome is underscored by the alchemical effects he achieves in these new works—aleatory, and as luminescent as the natural forms they evoke.

The watercolors and books are complemented by romantic landscape paintings, in which lakes can be glimpsed through screens of trees or where surfaces of splashed molten lead peel back to reveal the sea or landscape depicted beneath.

“Transition from Cool to Warm” is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication with essays by Karl Ove Knausgaard and James Lawrence, and an interview with Kiefer by Louisa Buck.

Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany, and lives and works in France. His work is collected by museums worldwide. Recent institutional exhibitions include Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2010); “Shevirat Hakelim,” Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2011); “Beyond Landscape,” Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2013); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2014); “L’Alchimie du livre,” Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (2015); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2015). In 2009, he directed and designed the sets for Am Anfang (In the Beginning) at the Opéra national de Paris. “Kiefer Rodin” will be on view at the Musée Rodin, Paris until October 2017, subsequently traveling to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. In November 2017, Kiefer will receive the J. Paul Getty medal for his contribution to the arts.

Taikang Space is glad to present Yang Jian’s individual show “Constructing Ruins” as its fourth round of the Light Pavilion Project in 2017. This exhibition is dedicated to a comprehensive project that took more than ten years to finish. The artist collected rebar scraps from the ruins of demolished buildings in the neighborhood of Caochangdi and spent a week transporting them to the exhibition hall before jointing and piecing them together until the space was restructured. Despite the rebirth of the architectural construction here is relied on the remains of the demolished buildings as well as their faintly discerned memories, we could hardly recognize even tiny resemblance between its past life and current presence. Dragged, piled, connected and twisted, these newly born structures and spaces fall into desolation, deformed and unusable, along the same process of constructing. Stepping into the heart of this deserted forest we see fixed display screens, drawings on construction blueprints and patchworks, architectural models and little sculptural works. These stuffs, born in Yang Jian’s studio in the last ten years, keep expanding the project of “ruins” to multiple dimensions. Some of them became parts of other exhibitions, some were planned and carried out as independent projects, but now they assembled here to be grafted into the paradoxical space of a self-defying constructing of itself. In this way, the artist has re-activated at least part of his oeuvre, and his job thus encompasses both a beginning that is always new and an ending that never ends, which fits in well with the aporia of the ruin - it’s no coincidence.
These “works” in the ruins beckon the audience, but the rolling rebars of unequal length seem to intimidate, with its sinister appearance, anyone who is resolved to enter. Ruins, after all, are not usable spaces for human beings, but it is human beings that unlock them. Only after we have gone through the barriers intentionally set here can we see clearly the message it conveys. Yang Jian attached to the twisty steel bars the scratchy sketches of architectures that could have never become reality for its plausible rules: The roof becomes a side wall, and the wall becomes the roof of another space; The two spaces, one inside and the other outside, share a movable roof and can convert to each other; The ladder then becomes the door and the room a seesaw; The building has disappeared, leaving only the negative form of it odds and ends - the negative is a ruin... These study of ruin lead to practical construction methods to create unusable architectures or usable ruins, like pushing of the boundaries, overlapping, reshaping, introducing the unpredictability, defunctionalization and fussification of the function, abnormal representation and juxtaposition of the interior and exterior structures, temporary and permanent transformation, etc. These descriptions, as much accurate as absurd, turn the action of building into bare ruin in an ironical way. A ruin also involves a modernist paradox. Inspired by the thousand-floor building without lifts in the cartoon “The Mindless and the Sulky”, Yang Jian mixes the building and the ruin, and turns them into miniature models of an unrealizable high-rise. In the video piece “We are constructing the ruins”, the artist juxtaposes the story of “Ghost City” of Erdos with the history of national socialism buildings, both accompanied by the spectre of exploitation, sacrifice and supremacy of money under the disguise of “social progress” and clamoring the history that can never be reached and in service of the fake future. Yet the image were cancelled by the texts which construct the only visual content of this video, rolling down the screen in the form of subtitles while incessantly taking over the role used to played by images. The latter hence becomes ruin, a void yet not meaningless.
Based on the play of images, videos, texts, concepts and their complicated relation, Yang Jian, like a fiction writer, weaves the paradox of ruin into something compact like reality and absurd like a dream. The absurdity lies in the fact that our imagination of the ruins always hopelessly gets time, history and the impulse to return to the origin - the ruin is a reminder of its origin, in this case a complete and intact building. Yang’s ruin, by contrast, starts and ends at the same point, that is, itself, and the ruin reaches in advance the starting point of the flashback, which cannot be restored. The ruin has no beginning, or in other words, its opening is similar to the paradox of “the end of architecture”. While building the ruin, the artist is completing a job based on a paradox with fiction-like record, paradoxical rumor, self-contradictory principles, ghostly landscape, sketches of human beings, functionless function, and illogical logic. What he has to do is neither less nor more than our reality.
Yang Jian was born in Fujian, China, in 1982. He graduated from the Art College of Xiamen University in 2007. Currently lived and works in Beijing and Nanjing.

Light Pavilion Project
As a site for individual project, “Light Pavilion” is initiated in 2012, based on the second floor of Taikang Space. It aims at providing a flexible platform for artists to realize their ambitions. After an interval of two years, “Light Pavilion” is restarted in 2016, embracing a vision always open to uncertainty, complicity and detournement. It’s not only a site for sensational immersion and experiential evocation but also a forum dedicated to diversity and otherness. In 2017, Light Pavilion will bring the young curators and their practice into its focus, and open to a more divisive, expanded field of contemporary art scene.